


How Well I Know You

by contrasoul (lesbianmedusa)



Category: The Fall (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 13:43:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2814065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianmedusa/pseuds/contrasoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>bit of a stella gibson character study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Well I Know You

The ability to compartmentalise was one of her assets; it was of vital importance to her. It allowed her to stay sane, or at least, convince herself that insanity wasn't creeping up on her like a leech to a bleeding wound. Now her documented dreams were held in zip bags in the basements of a police department and her personal life was spilling dangerously into her professional life; her dreams being held hostage as procedural evidence. She couldn't even bring herself to feel angry, instead she felt a kind of numbness that made her want to stare at her hotel room walls until everything around her, reality, was nothing but a kind of oblivion. Or she wanted something to jolt her back into action, back to efficient-coolly-in-control-Stella. She wanted to dig her nails into her skin, to leave little crescents on the surface; to feel something. It was almost a relief when she felt her eyes begin to sting and lifted her hand to find tears hesitatingly waiting there, as if they were uncertain as to whether they were allowed to trickle any further. She blinked and they fell; she sighed quietly.  
'Oh Stella Gibson, how well I know you now' ricocheted around in her head. Fuck Spector. Fuck him. Fuck. She was tired, she knew she should sleep but his handwriting had etched itself onto the inside of her brain. Sweet little Stella, sexy Stella, stroppy Stella, Stella, Stella... different personas, all usually neatly compartmentalised but thrown together distractingly in her dreams. She wasn't even sure which of them was more the 'real' her, was there a 'real' her or was she just an ungodly mix of childish nightmares and cold rage brought about by the things her life caused her to confront? Maybe a serial killer saw her better than she saw herself, she wondered what that said about her. Nothing reassuring.  
When she did sleep Spector's words tangled themselves into her subconscious. She dreamt of the morgue, of her body being pulled out of a drawer in the wall; her body bare, only covered by a pathetic white sheet. Someone drawing the sheet back, a scalpel working at her, her brain on a table, in someone's hands, being dissected, studied; she felt nothing. A lie. She could feel a morbid curiosity itching under her skin, it made her body-less self move closer to the brain, her brain, she reminded herself. What was she looking for? Some kind of truth? Self-knowledge? She wanted this lump of brain tissue to tell her who she really was. She wanted it to tell her that she wasn't empty or void of emotion that wasn't borne out of rage. She wanted the dreams to stop, memories to cease existing, people to never have existed in the first place. She wanted to know that she wasn't the other side of Spector's coin.  
She was awake again, her breathing hard and fragmented. Want. Want. Want. Question after question. Wave after wave of musings of existentialism; all entirely pointless, wholly selfish even.  
She could almost see Spector smirking to himself as he perused her journal, murmuring 'sweet little Stella' condescendingly as the hotel room that had come to know her looked on silently, laughing at her. She reminded herself he was just a man. He was any man. Then, the last thing she thought of before falling into another fitful bout of sleep was Spector rotting in a cell with only hallucinations of all the women he had murdered to accompany him. His smirk was nowhere to be seen.


End file.
